Admin setting to remove fork button from the UI
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Problem to solve
Several large GitLab customers have reported that their users are forking projects unnecessarily out of habit, based on variations of a fork-merge workflow they have learned elsewhere. However it is neither necessary, nor the organization's preferred workflow.
As a GitLab administrator or dev team lead, we want to discourage forking projects and promote users to follow workflows closer to GitLab flow.
Thousands of users forking hundreds or thousands of projects consumes large amounts of storage unnecessarily and can add load to an already taxed server. So having this as an option for admins or Group owners would be a huge help.
Intended users
GitLab Admins, and top-level group owners for sensitive business/project areas.
Proposal
Provide an admin or group owner setting to remove the fork button from the user interface. This would not strictly prevent forking, but would help greatly reduce casual forking and allow us to promote feature-branch workflows.